You saw the two pyramids as you rounded the bend in the highway. They were several stories high, rising above the Georgia pines. One was black and one was golden. If your car windows were rolled down, you could hear an ummmmm coming from unseen speakers.

I kept returning to the subject of the Nuwaubians, unable to let it go. Even a cursory amount of research showed that the group was a strange phenomenon of the modern age—a true American religion, sworn to a proto-hip-hop preacher sworn to nonsense, that attempted a takeover of a small Georgia town in the late 1990s before a joint federal-local raid brought down its leader. Beneath that historical account was a tangle of details bizarre and bottomless.